Waylon Park
"Spending a couple of weeks at Mount Massive Asylum, during which he was unable to even talk to his wife and son in Boulder thanks to strict security protocols, Waylon developed a deep-seated distrust of the profit-motivated scientists and doctors leading dangerous and irresponsible experiments on their patients." : ―Red Barrels' description for Waylon. Waylon Park is a software engineer and the unseen protagonist of Outlast: Whistleblower. He is the husband of Lisa Park and father of two boys. Background Waylon graduated from Berkeley with exceptional marks, Some time after this he met Lisa, who he married and had two sons with. Some time after, he got a job in software consulting and landed a two week contract deal with Murkoff at Mount Massive Asylum. He was given level three security clearance. At Mount Massive, he would maintain the Morphogenic Engine and additional programming along with Murkoff´s research and development division. After a few days, he was refused to talk to his wife and sons. Waylon later developed a deep-seated distrust of the profit-motivated scientists and doctors leading dangerous and irresponsible experiments on their patients. Realizing his mistake, he decided to try and expose Murkoff for their inhumane experiments. Story Outlast: Whistleblower On September 17, 2013, Waylon decides to send an email from a server room to a freelance journalist Miles Upshur in attempt to expose Murkoff's inhumane experiments to the public. Upon sending the mail, Waylon is interrupted by a colleague, who informs him that he has been paged to the Morphogenic Engine's main control room. Once there, he is asked by Steve, one of Murkoff's scientists, to fix the program and retrieve the camera view in one of the machine's pods. While doing so, one of Murkoff's test subjects, Eddie Gluskin, manages to escape the guards grip and runs towards reinforced glass, frightening Waylon and begging him for help. After Eddie was forced into the pod, Waylon manages to establish the connection and is asked to vacate the premises. Upon returning to the server room to retrieve the laptop, he's ambushed by Jeremy Blaire who breaks the computer, thinking that he wasn't able to send the email and along with a few guards, brutally pummels and sadistically mocks Waylon, before having one of the guards knock him out cold and forced into the Morphogenic Engine program. Two hours later after regaining consciousness, Waylon is strapped into a chair by Andrew and psychologically tortured with Morphogenic therapy. Andrew soon leaves in a hurry, after being informed that Billy has managed "lateral ascension" with the project. Once released from the restraints, Waylon collapses and starts seeing strange flashes before spotting The Walrider gruesomely killing one of the patients, as the facility goes dark and the asylum is thrown into chaos by the patients who manage to break free and start slaughtering Murkoff employees. After managing to get up, Waylon picks up a camcorder, used to monitor the patient's progress with the project, in order to record as much evidence on Murkoff as he can. He is then released from his cell by one of the patients. Exiting the room, and into the plastic-wrapped hallways he encounters The Walrider, who attacks him. Running away from it, Waylon finds himself in a room with several other Variants, who are stabbing a doctor on a table, expressing their hatred towards them and the need for revenge, saying that "There are no observers here". The lead Variant decides to spare Waylon and gives him a chance to leave. After exiting, Waylon is confronted by another hostile Variant who attempts to strangle him before he escapes into another room, locking the door behind him. Waylon then climbs through an air-vent where he overhears a guard and an office worker discussing a functioning short-wave radio in the Prison, giving Waylon the mission to find and use it. In his journey, he witnesses a doctor in an airlock begging him to open the doors. Doing so, a Variant comes in and brutally slams the doctor's head against the glass, traumatizing Waylon as he witnessed his first murder. Cutting though the kitchen, Waylon gets a splat of blood jump up in his face and sees that it was the head of a man stuffed in a microwave as he was animalistically eaten by a cannibalistic Variant. Disgusted, Waylon bolts out of the room to find a door locked by a dead man handcuffed to the handle. Waylon searches through a series of rooms to find the key whilst being hunted down by the cannibal. After finally unlocking the door which leads into another room, this time a morgue with the drawers composed of furnaces, the cannibal grabs him from behind and readies to slit his throat open, but backs out and instead stuffs him into a steaming hot furnace. Waylon quickly punches his way out the back via a weak brick wall before he's scorched and climbs up an exposed shaft over the morgue to find an airlock completely flooded in gas, seeing a man in it suffocating. Traveling through several laboratories with the cannibal on his back, Waylon turns the gas off with a valve and heads back through the now empty airlock into the Recreation Area. Exiting the asylum, Waylon wanders into the courtyard of the asylum where everything is almost completely encased in a cloud of blinding fog. With the short-wave radio still on his mind, Waylon trudges through the fog where he sees two terrified inmates dash past him, and after traveling through a basketball court where an inmate is playing solo basketball with a severed head, encounters the Twins who guard a fence Waylon wishes to pass, forcing him to go an alternate route through a guard post. This path eventually leads to the Prison where Waylon finally finds the radio and attempts to contact 911. However, a second before Waylon is able to respond, Jeremy Blaire lashes out from behind him and brutally beats the radio until it is unusable before trying to strangle Waylon with a nightstick. Blaire's attempted murder is interrupted by a terrifying growl nearby, scaring the supervisor off and sparing Waylon. A mangled body comes flying through the door, and the growl is revealed to belong to Chris Walker, who chases Waylon out of the Prison and on to an outside tool-shed. In the midst of this pursuit, Waylon briefly encounters Father Martin writing "Down the Drain" on the wall in blood, and overhears via the intercom that there's a safe haven in the administration block. After getting off the shed, Waylon's path is blocked off by an electrified fence so he searches for the generator room to deactivate it. In his search, Park spots a grinning figure glaring at him for a brief moment behind a blocked off door before leaving. Waylon eventually switches the electricity off only for a Variant to turn it back on again. Waylon heads back to again deactivate it, successfully, and is chased by a Variant through the now un-electrified gate, into a building, then up a water tower. He leaps off the water tower's peak onto an old wooden balcony, a jump that he underestimates and plummets through the roof of the Vocational Block. He is constantly stalked yet again as he tries to escape the block, this time by Dennis, a patient with multiple personality disorder, who mutters about a terrifying groom downstairs in need of a bride. A friendly Variant warns Waylon about the very same man before Dennis chases him deeper into the Vocational Block, a part in which one of Dennis's personalities call "Gluskin's Hell". The grinning stalker and groom from before is revealed to be Eddie Gluskin, who flirts with Waylon, seeing him as a beautiful woman in need of a marriage and the removal of his "vulgar" genitals. With Gluskin in pursuit, Waylon climbs up an elevator shaft before the ladder breaks apart under his weight and he falls on top of the elevator. A jagged splinter from the elevator's roof stabs into Waylon's ankle, partially crippling him as he writhes in pain. Gluskin is shocked that Waylon would hurt himself like that and sees this as suicidal rejection, attempting to kill his "bride by activating the elevator to rise to the roof and crush Waylon under it. However, Waylon escapes this deathtrap and limps his way out of the Vocational Block, but before he can escape, is chased into a locker by Gluskin and dragged to his gruesome lair in hopes of removing Waylon's genitals and turning him into a "true woman". During the wait, Gluskin drugs Waylon, still trapped in the locker, with sleeping gas which lasts for 12 hours. Waylon wakes up to two Variants being brutally castrated and killed by Gluskin until it his own turn, being tied to a wooden bed, naked, and set up to have his genitals buzz-sawed off. However, right before this can commence, the bed is knocked off in a fight between a random Variant and Gluskin, allowing Waylon to don his clothes, pick up his battery drained camera, and escape. Gluskin gets back on track on his pursuit for Waylon and chases him out a high window, a fall that completely shatters Waylon's leg as Gluskin angrily screams at this rejection. Waylon hobbles to safety only to find himself back in his foe's lair and in a gymnasium of dozens of castrated corpses strung up by a system of ropes and metal rods. Waylon looks for the exit's key, the Male Ward, through a mimic of a wedding where he finds the key and gets out of the Vocational Block. However, Gluskin yanks Waylon right back in and beats him until he's crippled before stringing him up by a rope and attempting to hang him in the gymnasium of bodies. Waylon's weight rips the planks and ropes out of the wooden ceiling, and this pulls Gluskin into the patch of metal rods, violently impaling him. In his last breath, Gluskin grabs the still hanging Waylon's hand and chokes out "We could've been beautiful", before being yanked up to the roof with a family of rods skewering him. This lowers Waylon to the ground where he makes it to the Male Ward, sees the burning church of Father Martin, witnesses Trager's corpse, evades the recently arrived Tactical officers, and finally makes it to the administration block where he sees that outside is bathed in sunshine. However, what stands between Waylon and escape is the mortally wounded Jeremy Blaire in the exit's doorway, telling him that they could help each other. Once Waylon tries to advance out the door, Blaire lashes out and stabs him in the stomach. Before Jeremy could finish his murder, he is cut off for a second time, this time by The Walrider who rips the man apart, sending his blood and marrow to shower the horribly wounded and scarred Waylon. He hobbles his way through the asylum's gates and drives the abandoned jeep of Miles Upshur out to freedom as Miles himself, who has been possessed by The Walrider, exits the doors of the asylum as well. The game ends with a mysterious man telling Waylon, who has been cleaned up, that he can upload all of the footage he took of the Mount Massive Slaughter and show the world how demented Murkoff is, at the cost of his family and his own safety. Waylon ultimately decides to upload the footage, surely dooming his family and himself. Outlast: The Murkoff Account Waylon later abandons Miles' jeep at Billy Hope's old home town and Murkoff is unable to locate him nor Simon Peacock, his whistleblowing associate. In retaliation, they hack his upload account and attempt to discredit him with outlandish and poorly written articles.3 Before or after the above event, Waylon burns down his house and he, his wife and sons, flee their home. While searching through the rubble, Pauline Glick and Paul Marion discover a family photo of Waylon, his wife and their two sons.4 Personality Waylon's personality prominently contrasts from Miles' as evidenced by his notes, depicted as a nervous and gentle man caring only about surviving to see his family, instead of the more cynical and aggressive persona of Miles. Almost every note mentions his wife, and illustrates how much he cares about her, as well as his children. He starts contemplating suicide during the riots, believing it to be an easier way to avoid suffering a fate worse than death at the hands of the asylum's deranged inmates, but never goes through with it, as he wants to get back to his family. He has a high sense of morality, being one of the few Murkoff employees who actually rebels against his corporation's inhumane actions, and has a very poetic way of writing. This, along with the fact that he got a cum laude at Berkeley and his quick mathematical skills in one of his notes, makes it very likely he is highly intelligent, and is also seen to be a very non-violent man unlike Miles who frequently insults his enemies. The two times Waylon remotely looses his politeness is when he's trying not to laugh upon seeing the death of Gluskin, and his pragmatic comments about leaving Jeremy Blaire to die of his injuries. A small but interesting fact is that, even when being hunted down, rarely ever slams a door, always gently closing it, another contrast to Miles who regularly slams doors violently. Physical description Waylon possesses three models, the first model being him in his casual clothing, which is donned in the Underground Lab and epilogue. This attire includes a yellow plaid shirt with the sleeves rolled up to reveal a white dress shirt underneath. He also wears blue jeans and white sneakers with black accents. The second model, worn throughout the rest of the game, is him in a prisoner attire, consisting a burlap jumpsuit that reveals his bare feet and forearms, and is boldly labelled with his prisoner number. A light olive green undershirt also lurks under the jumpsuit. His third and final model is when he is completely nude, used in the Vocational Block where he is revealed to be a hairy and well-built man. His shadow reveals he has short hair, which is shown to be dark and curly.5 During a meeting with Pauline Glick and Paul Marion, Waylon donned a dark suit and tie.6 Trivia * A whistleblower is a person who exposes misconduct, alleged dishonest or illegal activity occurring in an organization. * Much like Miles Upshur, Waylon never speaks, and is only heard by grunts and screams. Coincidentally, there is a part in the game where Waylon attempts to use a radio to reveal the emergency situation in Mount Massive Asylum, though before Waylon gets a chance to say anything, he's attacked by Jeremy Blaire, who destroys the radio beyond use. * Waylon's email address is 10260110756@mutemail.com. * The reveal post differs from the final version of the game:7 ** The protagonist's name is spelled both as "Waylon" and "Weylon". ** It states that Waylon has only one son, but the protagonist notes in one of his journals that he has two. ** Although the game shows Waylon sending the document exclusively to Miles via email, the post and one of Park's notes state that he leaked information to a variety of journalists. * Park's family originally lived in Boulder, Colorado; however, the protagonist's notes and an email regarding his status between Murkoff executives confirms that they have since moved to Leadville, most likely to allow for easier commuting to his workplace at Mount Massive Asylum. * Waylon is possibly an atheist or an agnostic as he states he's never prayed a day in his life.8